Ten Ton Hammer has posted a new developer diary from Bruce Harlick, Senior Designer of City of Heroes, NCSoft's comic book hero themed MMO. The diary details the effort which went into designing a Task Force and Strike Force for the game's fifth anniversary events.

When we started kicking strike force and task force ideas around for City of Heroesí 5th Anniversary, one villain group immediately leapt to mind: the 5th Column. It had always been intended to have the 5th Column return to Paragon City and the confluence between their name and our anniversary was just too good to pass up. Besides, it gave us a chance to bring back the most requested villain who never actually appeared in game: the Reichsman.

It was important to make sure that the Strike Force and Task Force felt different; the villains should be doing villainous things and feel more active in the cause and effect of the events that would unfold while the Blue side should be heroic and more reactive to the events. And I didnít want the two arcs to be simple mirrors of each others, with the villains doing something and the heroes stopping it. I wanted the villains to succeed with their plan and to deal with the consequences, and I wanted the heroes to deal with an emerging big problem.

Though Reichsmanís return is a big event, it would start small, just like any other job. The Omega Team time capsule is due to be opened later this year, and it seemed like a good thing to use in the story: What if Hero 1 hid some secret information in the capsule, in case he didnít come back from Omega Teamís raid on the Rikti home dimension, and what if some enterprising Arachnos agent got wind of this information and decided to get his hands on it? From there, it was a pretty easy step to have this agent hire the villains to go into Atlas Park and get the information from the time capsule, which had been moved to under City Hall. David Nakayama did a fantastic bit of concept art for a reimaged time capsule and Don Pham brought it to life in the game. Itís fantastic work.